Sandgrains News

Our Portuguese parters at Sciaena are kicking of their annual Scianema Film Festival focused on the oceans in order toencourage, inspire andcreate awareness.
On Friday the 19th of February you can go catch Sandgrains starting at 8pm in Faro.

Event with talks, dinner of Cape Verdean Cachupa and dancing at the tunes of Funaná.
If you are around be sure to not miss it. Free entry!!

Sandgrains is finally traveling back to Lisbon for the Portuguese national Premiere!

An event organized in congiunction with the Associação Caboverdeana de Lisboa and hosted by Pong-Pesca, a partner organization that has been with us from the early stages and who organized a crowdfunding event for the Sandgrains project back in 2012.

Teatro do Bairro, free entry, Monday 17th of November at 18:30.
With the participation of our Jordie Montevecchi, co-director of the documentary.

We're super happy to announce that Sandgrains has won the Parda Award for Best Film at the 5th edition of the Cabo Verde International Film Festival!

Last weekend our documentary has finally gone back to Cape Verde to be showcased to the wider public. A beautiful screening on the beach of Sal Island.
Unfortunately we couldn't be present, but the good news got to us very fast, with friends messaging us even before the festival notified us of the prize.

Cinema has a key role in educating and raising awareness, at the same time as entertaining. The Environmental Film Festival Albania holds and defends the idea that the right to environment is a right for everyone, a common good that has a great relevance and importance for our daily life and for the planet we live in.

These are the reasons why Sandgrains has been specifically picked by the festival team to be screened. Their goal is screening the best environmental movies and documentaries, both international and Albanian, in order to involve the majority of the Albanian society, from different ages, backgrounds and places.

The second edition of the Environmental Film Festival Albania will take place on 17-24 May 2014 in four cities across the country: Tirana, Permet, Vlora and Shkodra.

On the Swedish side of the pond things have been afoot with Sandgrains over the last few months. Last year Zé and Gabriel went to the Alimenterre festival in Prague for two screenings of the film around the topic of food as a basic human right. We had a great time thanks to our lovely host Wendy, and the discussions following the film were really inspiring.

In December Gabriel did a talk for the Swedish Green Party on the external dimension of EU fisheries, showing excerpts from the film, which in turn led to a recent screening of the film and a talk with Gabriel and MEP Isabella Lövin, who is in the film and is running for another term at the European Parliament. There is another fisheries deal coming up with Cape Verde in August, so we would really like to do a screening in Parliament prior to the vote.

Also Doc Lounge Gothenburg, a documentary appreciation society, screened the film recently around the topic of crowdfunding, which in turn has led to our very first film festival in Sweden. Gothenburg Indie Film Fest is coming up on Friday the 23rd of May, so don’t miss out if you’re in town!

What’s more, Zé just spent a month in Cape Verde, and the film was screened for our most important audience: the fishing families of Ribeira da Barca. They were ecstatic about it, and the TV station RTV did a four minute news piece with Zé about the film. This, from what we gather, has led to a public outcry, with the government pledging funds for artisanal fishers. We await more news on this.

Here an extract from this article by our online distributors in Germany.

"The intention of the documentary could not be more in harmony with it's whole evolution, for it is a film which denounces the environmental effects of global fishing. And it's success as a film is true thanks to the will and confidence of many different people who put their money into it." Clara Rodríguez A.